“Are you all right?”
“Still blind, but compared to you guys I’m really good.” Her bare feet were scraped and blotchy with bruises. It hurt to look at them. She tossed aside her mangled helmet and repositioned herself, squatting on a ledge just below me. “Let me see your arm,” she said as she moved in close, her head inches from my arm as she first scanned it with her eyes, then fluttered her fingers over it. Pia stood over us, a bleeding sentinel.
“You don’t have to break it again or any of that shit, do you?” I said, realizing I was still crying, and that it had become almost perpetual.
Again her mop of drenched hair tracked up and down my forearm, dripping on my gooseflesh. I tried to leave my body for a bit, but, no. Even though I could feel the wisdom in her fingers, I shuddered with pain at any touch, including her hot breath on me. As she uttered the words “This’ll just take a sec,” she gripped my wrist and elbow, leaned in with her shoulder at the break, and with her body weight snapped my arm back into place.
I screamed. Partly from surprise, but mostly from agony. Pia slapped her hand over my mouth. “Quiet, Win, come on, you have to . . .”
I wailed into her palm.
Cradling my arm, I rolled over onto my good side and stuffed my screams back into my throat and down into my body. My cheek pressed against the cold stone. A balm. I floated in and out of consciousness, maybe to grab a few seconds away from detonating pain. From far away, I heard Pia and Rachel shuffling around me, talking in low tones.
Consciousness returned with the feel of Pia’s hand cupping river water to my mouth. “Come on,” she whispered. “You have to get up. We have to hide.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position with my good arm. It had grown dark enough so the colors of things had leaked away, and the trees behind us reached up like wraiths against an azure evening. A few yards beyond us the river rumbled blackly, intent on its night business.
Rachel squatted next to me.
“Sorry, but I have to do this.” She laid a stick along my forearm and looped Pia’s belt around it several times, finally buckling it in place. I struggled to not cry out. Patiently she held open the other half of Pia’s T-shirt as I slipped my injured arm through it, then jury-rigged it into a primitive sling.
“You are one slick asshole with that arm-breaking thing,” I said.
“You’ll thank me later, hon,” Rachel said, “when your arm isn’t shaped like a horseshoe.”
“Hey, you guys,” Pia stage-whispered from somewhere behind us in the gloom where the forest met the rocks we sat on. “Get over here. You’re too out in the open over there.”
Rachel helped me to my feet, and we made our way to the sound of Pia’s voice, which came from the base of a massive beech. Impossibly heavy branches encircled the trunk, extending several yards at waist height before curving skyward as if reaching up to grasp something. Rachel got down on her hands and knees and crawled to the base of the tree to join Pia. I crouched down, my head and arm pounding. Inhaled the peaty smell of moss and damp wood. Soon we sat butted up against the tree, peering out at the descending shelves of granite and shale and the river beyond. Pia was right. No doubt we’d been practically glowing in the moonlight on those rocks. Still, no tree was going to save us. The air rose up chilled from the river, full of the smell of wet stones.
“I’m going to get some rocks together,” Pia said. “In case someone comes.”
Rachel and I watched her silhouette hunt along the river. Though she treated her bad arm gingerly, still she used both to forage. She gathered sharp sticks and fist-size stones, every now and then dropping a bundle of forest weaponry next to our tree. I watched the pile grow, too blown out to comment on the futility of the thing, trying to picture how stones would defend us against bullets and arrows. I wondered why none of us had had the presence of mind to stash a knife, matches, anything of use into the many fancy pockets of our vests or clothing at the beginning of this trip. Idiotic. But I also thought about Pia’s harping about living in the present and realized I had been present more than ever these last few days, and maybe that was the only reason I was still alive.
Pia tossed one last armful on the pile and crawled in with us, shivering. “We have to be ready,” she said hoarsely.
“How can we be ready?” I said.
“We have to be ready to kill them. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Jesus Christ, Pia,” Rachel said.
“Well, are you?”